Film Review: Mr. Nobody Against Putin

5 Stars

By Joseph Beyer | March 7, 2026

With the Oscars just around the corner, allow me to give you an edge with your ballot and suggest that if history is any guide, there’s a decent chance that the documentary Mr. Nobody Against Putin will take home the gold.

That’s because “Hollywood” (as manifested by the 11,000 voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences), has a long tradition of rewarding movies that poke the Russian bear and generate caricatures the likes of Ivan Drago in Rocky IV.

We’ve seen it happen from fictional stories like Doctor Zhivago in 1965 and Leviathan in 2015, to riveting true documentaries like Icarus in 2018, Navalny in 2023, or most recently 20 Days in Mariupol in 2024. Some say even the Best Picture winner Anora is really a thinly disguised takedown of the Russian kleptocracy.

Through all of it, the USA is good and the former Soviet Union is bad. And it’s precisely that age-old simplicity that made me skeptical that the documentary Mr. Nobody Against Putin would have anything new to add to the mix. But it does, and it’s deeply unsettling.

While shocking, this inside story of how the Russian government tried to control and manipulate views on its war with Ukraine (and how that propaganda became elementary school-level policy), isn’t unexpected. What differentiates this documentary is the deeply human voice behind the camera and the “nobody” in the film’s title.

Born and raised in Russia’s most-famous-polluted-city of Karabash, Pavel Talankin is the main character and guide of the film. “Pasha” is loved by his students in his role as the school’s videographer and official archivist, and the 33-year-old is passionate about his job.

But after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, his work is forced to shift from documentation to indoctrination as he films children in military drills, reciting party-line history, and pledging allegiance to the violence and war thousands of miles away. Once records of happy moments, Pasha’s tapes and recordings now become required proof of the school’s compliance to the new “patriotic” requirements the government has imposed.

His first-person images capture not only the mind games being played on children, but also his own arc of frustration and his loss of innocence when he turns the camera on himself, recording confessionals as he becomes aware of what’s happening around him.

And in the background of this small town he loves, the young men sent off to this war stop returning and the government’s attempts to control the narrative become more desperate. When his disgust boils over, Pasha resigns from the school.

But he soon realizes the power of his own cameras and he returns to the school with a new goal in mind: secretly capture what’s happening using his job as a cover, secure the footage, and expose the truth.

The results are almost entirely Pasha’s making, but U.S. director David Borenstein shares credit and helped shape the documentary, working with Pasha secretly for two years of filming before helping to extract him from Russia after they discover he’s being surveilled.

A horrifying portrait of the human cost of war and the psychological toll of living under an oppressive regime, one can see Mr. Nobody Against Putin as a scathing reminder of tyranny and it is. But it’s also possible to see many of these tactics at work in our own Western cultural grooming, and the shameful oppression of speech happening all around us here at home, blurring the lines of Us versus Them.

Running 1 hour 30 minutes, Mr. Nobody Against Putin is available to stream on Amazon and AppleTV. The film has been nominated for Best Documentary in this year’s Academy Awards.